Should we switch our builds to Terser?

[Reinmar]

Webpack 4 switched to uglify-es but according to mishoo/UglifyJS#3156 (comment) uglify-es is dead:

so it seems strange to abandon it. Since you haven't deprecated it on NPM, should I assume you're only taking a break from maintaining it?

uglify-es has been forked and the new project is called terser. For projects that need ES6 support, use it instead of uglify-es, since all new development will be happening over there (and things like webpack are switching over to it shortly too):
https://github.com/fabiosantoscode/terser

Looking at the links leading to mishoo/UglifyJS#3156 everyone is switching to Terser now. Webpack 5 will use Terser as well.

Question – when should we do the transition ourselves? Should we wait for webpack 5 or do that before it?

One thing to consider would be – is Terser ready? According to some comments it's not particularly stable yet. Also, looking at how frequently this changes... I'm afraid that before webpack 5 will be released they'll change the decision again to something else (while this is meant to be a joke, I'd like to understand what's the background behind big players switching to Terser so suddenly).

[Reinmar]

OK, it seems that webpack 4 may switch to terser as well because they consider this a non-breaking change:

webpack/webpack#8350 (comment)

[ma2ciek]

So after the webpack changes the minifier it might be a good moment to change it too. Maybe terser isn't the best and most stable, but it's actively maintained. - see e.g. the terser/terser#165.

[Reinmar]

it's actively maintained.

As I wrote in webpack/webpack#8350 (comment), I'm not worried about today. I'm worried what will be next year :D

[Reinmar]

It's high time to finally move to terser. Lots of docs to update because we have plenty of uglifyjs-webpack-plugin occurrences.

[Reinmar]

Followup to review the docs in #5836.